Many organizations bill on a monthly basis to a very large customer base. Staggered billing dates throughout the month result in a steady influx of payments. Centralized payment processing centers receive hundreds of thousands of individual payments, usually by personal check, on a daily basis which must be credited to the proper account and the check must be deposited as quickly as possible for obvious economic reasons. Over the past decade or so, an industry has emerged whose products speed up the job of handling all of this mail by electronically reading the checks and the bills at speeds humans cannot begin to match. Mail opening machines to speed the extraction of bill and check from the envelope are also available.
The desire to completely automate the process of moving checks and bills directly from the envelope into reading machines has been stymied by the fact that a high percentage of personal checks come out of the envelope upside down or backward and must be properly turned before entering the highspeed reading machines. As a result, a staff of operators must be employed to do the physical removal of checks and bills from the envelopes and orient them as required.
Recently there has been a movement toward developing semi-intelligent machines that recognize the orientation of each document as it emerges from the envelope and electronically signals downstream mechanical devices to flip or roll each offending document into a correct orientation. Machines of this type are very expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, such machines are large and thereby use up valuable floor space. Most importantly they are complex in nature and difficult to maintain. Once they breakdown, the production bottleneck consequences are unacceptable.